With the prevalence of networked computer systems, obtaining data can be as convenient and simple as a few mouse clicks on a network-connected computer. However, searching for specific data on the network may not be an easy task especially when a user does not know the correct or complete spelling of the data he or she is looking for. The user may need to take a ‘trial-and-error’ approach by searching with different spellings of the search term, for example. Further, when the search term contains multiple words, the user may need to enter in a data entry field of a user interface (e.g., a web page on a browser) of a network-connected computer at least the first word and a portion of the second word in order for the computer systems to return search results that closely match what the user is looking for. Therefore, it would be convenient to the user if a list of suggested search terms can be provided, such as in a drop-down menu on the web page, as soon as the user starts entering the beginning of the search term. If the particular search term yet to be completely entered by the user is among those in the suggestion list, all the user needs to do is to select it (e.g., by highlighting the particular search term in the drop-down menu and pressing the ENTER key, or by moving the cursor over the particular search term with a mouse and clicking the mouse) to conduct a search using that particular search term.
Thunderbird, a personal electronic mail application product from Mozilla, provides a user with a list of suggested e-mail addresses after the user has entered the beginning of an e-mail address in the address field. Google Suggest, a tool from Google, provides a user with a fixed number (i.e., ten) of suggested terms. The suggested terms are popular terms searched by users of Google's search engine. The first letter or the first few letters of those suggested terms match the letter or the few letters the user has entered. However, when a user is not searching for an e-mail address or if the search term is not among one of those popular search terms, a user may still have to face the inconvenience previously described.
In a data storage system, such as a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory, each of the data entries in the directory may contain one or more attributes describing the data entry. For example, a entry of a person in an LDAP directory may contain the name, the phone number, the e-mail address, and the city where the person's office is located. In this example, the name, the phone number, the e-mail address, and the city is each an attribute of the entry for that person. In some LDAP directory services, to search for data entries containing certain characteristics among a plurality of data entries the user must specify in which attribute of the plurality of data entries the search should be conducted. It would be convenient if a list of suggested data entries can be provided to a user if the user is searching for a particular entry in the directory accessing a number of attributes of the data entries may contain the search term or phrase, as the user begins to enter an alphanumeric character representative of a portion of the search term or phrase.